The Buddhist situation 2500 years ago may indeed have been not so different from our own, with a rapidly expanding population soon to go into a stall, and the Brahmanization of India underway, i.e. the caste system, threatening to lock people into a form of submission to which they’d never previously been subjected. And it’s no accident that so many religions sprouted within a half millennium or so of the beginning of the common era, with any self-respecting guru prophesying the End of Days…

All of a sudden renunciation doesn’t look like such a bad option. And so it is today, because what can they do if you simply refuse to cooperate, simply renounce all ties to the current oligarchs, slave-owners and warmongers? They can’t force you to work. They can beat you; they can even kill you. But they can’t force you to work. They can threaten your loved ones, though…(More …)

All three major international religions have carried their original premises to ridiculous extremes, along with their adherents, whether cause or effect, those original premises all quite similar, and compatible, variations on the themes of love, righteousness, and perseverance, each with a different focus, Christianity on the love, Islam on the righteousness, and Buddhism on the perseverance…

And from these humble commendable compatible and civilizing influences, each has gone their own ways, Islam to the extremes of religious fundamentalism, holy wars and unholy alliances; Christianity drenched in sex, drugs, and all that rap; and Buddhist perseverance easily given over to passivity, even in the face of the most egregious assaults on basic human rights, individuals reduced to fit in cages, self-imposed prisons of consciousness… (More …)

Like a new drug, when trying out a new religion, philosophy or belief system, it’s probably wise to ask about any potential side-effects. Of course sometimes those ‘side-effects’ turn out to be something not anticipated, or imagined, and maybe even far better than what was intended. The history of pharmacopeia is full of such examples, when the ‘side-effects’ of a drug led to new usages that yielded great benefits to the healing processes—and perversions—of human beings..

This also happens in the case of new ideas. Who knew that John Stuart Mills’ evocation of the ‘invisible hand’ of the marketplace would yield not only an Industrial Revolution of textiles and iron, but a digital revolution of gigabytes and live streaming, the former populated by skyscrapers and fashion, the latter by instant worldwide communication and virtual realities intrinsically internal… (More …)

Well said my friend, well said. It is really easy to see and to judge whether something is beneficial or not. Plant the seed and watch it grow. If you grow weeds, start again. If you grow flowers and fruit you have really done something.

You make a very good case here. And provide a useful, well-balanced summary of the differences:

“Bottom line: the current outcome of Christianity is chaos, consumption and aggression, even if its best days were all about love, growth, and creativity. On the other hand Buddhism is all about silence, adaptation and harmony, even if the bad old days included much too much renunciation, stasis and denial… ”

If there’s anything more annoying, as a Buddhist Studies MA student, than having to memorize lists of lists after lists full of lists from the annals of the ancients, it’s having to plow through the re-definitions of all those terms from the mouths of the moderns (is ‘anals’ a word?). This is not high scholarship. This is the business of busy-work, the intellectual equivalent of keeping that shovel moving to justify your union job, or to keep your position as the arbiter of privilege in the fan-boy chat-pages of Facebook…

Yet that’s what they all do, in the Western Lands, at least, and even in the temples, too, as if only one new definition ‘changes everything’, so that the Pali/Sanskrit word ‘dukkha‘ is no longer merely ‘suffering’ but ‘stress’, ‘anguish, ‘dissatisfaction’, or maybe even just ‘a spot of unpleasantness’ so easily resolved by following that Yellow Brick Road known as the 8FP, Eight-fold Path, when the reality is not so easy at all… (More …)

…us, of R1 genome, y-DNA, that is, not mitochrondial, we the barbarians from the north, land of ice and snow, with broken hearts and bad manners, satisfying ourselves with whomever whenever wherever, animal instincts and animal appetites, with an inclination toward wheels, and gears, and wine, and dark beers, anything to make the boring food go down easier, trail food, and whatever gets you through the night…

But it must have something incredible to watch, erstwhile Aryans, light-skinned and beefy, from creamy milk, rolling in over the high plains, toward India, literally rolling, in chariots and carts pulled by horses and oxen, herding cows and goats and wayward children, lording it over the local slim swarthy dark-skinned Dravidians, so-called, for lack of a better name, in what must have been the world’s first great culture clash, the likes of which wouldn’t be seen againuntil the American genocide, this just the preamble to that constitution… (More …)

NO, this is not click-bait; this is Buddhism, and I’m dead serious. OKAY, so maybe they weren’t Russians exactly, and MAYBE I have a lively imagination, and am an excitable boy from way back, AND you can’t just talk casually about the ‘Aryan invasion’ of India way back when, ever since Hitler crapped on us all with his inimitable armies, half-empty promises and his half-baked theories, BUT there is an element of truth to his Aryan (c)rap…

Hitler just never did his homework really, all bark and no wood, jumping to conclusions and tilting at windmills, and absolutely no desire to make amends with his lessers of men. But now we have genomic research, which lends a strong measure of empirical (not imperial) truth to what used to be wild speculation, whether it be eye-witness testimony clouded by memory, or no-witness history clouded by time… (More …)

…and that’s about as accurate as any translation of the Pali word dukkha as any other, certainly better than the ‘stress’ or ‘discomfort’ or whatever currently making the rounds in Buddhist blurbs online and elsewhere, anything but ‘suffering’, the traditional and still most accurate definition. We’re talking about a metaphysical level of suffering here, after all, or at least existential, the kind that envelops you in its inimitable embrace, and lets you know exactly where you stand, or fall, which is usually somewhere nearby and knowable, so treatable…

The newer ‘stress’-full definition of dukkha suggests a modern post-capitalist phase that the Buddha himself could hardly have imagined back in the classic Upanishadic era of pre-colonial India, actually post-colonial if you count Aryans as intruders, and not the high-class homeboy Brahmins that they usually like to see themselves as. They brought as many chariots, horses, cows and racism as they ever brought religion, more like high plains cowboys than the meditative masters that we now see them as (though they did have good drugs—I hear)… (More …)

Imagine a place out on the steppes of Asia, the stepping stones to Europe, maybe the Caucasus, or somewhere farther east, out on the outskirts of the civvies and the cities, say maybe 5-6000 years ago, with the climes warming up and paths leading north, where a group of people probably only a few thousand strong, not so urban, but not so stupid, playing around with wheels and ales and axles and weapons, found a will and a way in this world, spreading outward until they gradually lost contact with each other and their languages became harder to understand, eventually to become the Celts of Europe and the Persians of Asia and the Greeks of the Mediterranean, and the Hittites who never really left, now North Europeans, South Europeans, Indians, Iranians, and… Armenians, who never really left…

…speaking related Indo-Aryan-European languages, Aryan the same word as Iran, long before it meant ‘Nordic’, swastika a Hindu symbol, Persian sharing words with English and Spanish, “Swas Ti Ka” meaning “hello” in Thai via Sanskrit, long before Hitler crapped on us all, long before Muslims felt like they had to fight for their lives to survive Western colonization, long before Jews decided they weren’t really Middle Easterners at all, more like Europeans in fact, with all that represents…

Chaos theory: but for a few butterflies fluttering by at random times places and faces altering time-lines and wait times, we might still be one tribe today, speaking mutually intelligible dialects of the same language and fighting over politics, not—wait a minute—threatening the future of the world. After all, are we really that much different? Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, French, English and others all have proud histories, major snafus, and a common background. Is their death wish really that much different from our death wish? Are we really any more reliable with a Bomb than they are?(More …)

the Indo-European migration came full circle, complete with epicycles.Not only did the original tribes expand from some unknown center reaching India and Europe, but Gypsies changed their minds and went to Europe from India.Then, of course, the hippies left their tracks and traces, albeit more symbolically than numerically, going to India from Europe.The original language spread even farther than the people themselves, Sanskrit splitting into as many languages or more than its Roman cousin and spreading vocabulary even farther into the South Pacific.Unfortunately oil and water are slow to mix, but seem content to languish in their potential for a spicy vinaigrette, or, in other words, racism.Any pretense to some other social distinction is pure fiction.India’s caste system is based on skin color, pure and simple, as if that were some sort of genetic threshold.I suspect it has more to do with solar exposure than pure genetics, regardless.Thus the original Dravidian-speaking inhabitants were pushed further south and further down the social stratum in favor of the Aryan newcomers, a system which will likely continue into eternity.